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THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015
worse things than getting caught try-
ing"---but his last attempt left him badly
disillusioned. His public comments now
make it clear that only if Israel and the
Palestinians come knocking will he get
involved in a negotiation. In 2014, as
Kerry shuttled from capital to capital,
one Israeli cabinet minister told me,
"We are only doing this for you!" Moshe
Ya'alon, Netanyahu's defense minister,
was quoted in the Israeli press saying,
"The only thing that can 'save us' is
for John Kerry to win a Nobel Prize
and leave us in peace." Kerry, Ya'alon
said, "turned up here determined and
acting out of misplaced obsession and
messianic fervor."
The relationship further soured when
Netanyahu brought his campaign against
the Iran nuclear deal to the floor of the
U.S. Congress. "The frustration with
the Israelis on a lot of issues has been
sky-high," one senior U.S. o cial told
me, characterizing the mood at both
the White House and the State De-
partment. American o cials are frus-
trated in various ways with the Pales-
tinians as well, but, as the o cial said,
"they don't have any power in this dy-
namic. The Israelis have all the cards."
As a diplomat, Kerry is duty-bound
to describe raw reality in upholstered
platitudes. And so, after his long ses-
sion in Berlin with Netanyahu, he said,
in a voice that had been rendered a
scratchy whisper by too many hours of
talking, that the meeting left him "cau-
tiously encouraged." He hoped to "re-
solve age-old di erences in a frozen
conflict." He wanted the "parties" to
"pull back from the precipice" and go
down a "road that takes people some-
where." And so on.
State Department aides said that
sources of Kerry's exasperation with Ne-
tanyahu range from the injustice of set-
tlement building in the West Bank to
the way he employs Yitzhak Molcho,
his lawyer and confidant, to stifle even
the most inconsequential negotiation.
Kerry's special envoy Frank Lowenstein
told me that Kerry will "play through
the whistle," and persist with the Israe-
lis and the Palestinians until the end of
his time in o ce, but he added, "The
window for a two-state solution is clos-
ing, though none of us who've worked
on it will regret that we tried to save it."
Kerry believes that Israel, along with
the occupied territories, is headed to-
ward becoming a "unitary state that is
an impossible entity to manage." He is
particularly concerned, he said, that the
Palestinian Authority could collapse;
that, in the event, the P.A.'s thirty thou-
sand security o cers would scatter; and
that chaos and increasingly violent
clashes with Israel would follow.
"I understand the passions that are
behind all of this---I get it," Kerry told
me. "If it were easy, it would have been
done a long time ago. I happen to be-
lieve there is a way forward. There's a
solution. It would be good for Israel; it'd
be great for the Palestinians; it'd be great
for the region. People would make so
much money. There'd be so many jobs
created. There could be peace. And you
would be stronger for it. Because nobody
that I know or have met in the West
Bank is anxious to have jihadis come in.
"The alternative is you sit there and
things just get worse," Kerry went on.
"There will be more Hezbollah. There
will be more rockets. And they'll all be
pointed in one direction. And there will
be more people on the border. And what
happens then? You're going to be one
big fortress? I mean, that's not a way to
live. It seems to me it is far more intel-
ligent and far more strategic---which is
an important word here---to have a the-
ory of how you are going to preserve
the Jewish state and be a democracy and
a beacon to the world that everybody
envisioned when Israel was created."
I asked him if he could imagine an
end to the State of Israel.
"No, I don't believe that's going
to happen," he said. "It's just, What
is it going to be like, is the question.
Will it be a democracy? Will it be a
Jewish state? Or will it be a unitary
state with two systems, or some draco-
nian treatment of Palestinians, because
to let them vote would be to dilute the
Jewish state? I don't know. I have no
answer to that. But the problem is, nei-
ther do they. Neither do the people who
"Lately, I feel like the only time I have to myself
is when I'm having sex with Brian."
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